Denis Opudo
4Sight Holdings mainly offers industry 4.0-related solutions services and implements applicable technology stacks within important industry ranks. This helps companies to analyze, optimize, visualize and digitize their data systems and operations. The firm announced on 26th April 2018 that it bought AccTech Systems and Dynamics Africa. The two were acquired at a deal worth R120 million and R30 million respectively.
The development came after 4Sight Holdings was listed on the JSE’s AltX board. The firm managed to raise funds to help in its plans to expand its services via strategic acquisitions. Dynamics Africa Services is an independent software vendor (ISV) which majors on GP (formerly Great Plains) Enterprise and Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) solutions. 4Sight Holdings’ CEO Antonie van Rensburg said that the acquisition is a great step towards the firm’s aim of reaching its strategic vision. Founded in 1994 AccTech has remained to be the main provider of enterprise applications like human resources (HR), business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business process management (BPM). According to AccTech’s CEO Tertius Zitzke, 33% of the firm’s clients have managed to adopt the above applications due to the startup’s Intellectual Property that started in 1998. The clients have adopted specifically BPM to improve the efficiency of their operations. This is an important part of the digital transformation.
Enterprise applications used to be provided in silos and on-premises way back before the emergence of cloud computing. However, the digitization of communication systems, services, processes and platforms now helps in integration of technology stacks. Dynamics Africa Systems is the main value-added resellers (VAR) for Microsoft Dynamics group in the Middle East and Africa (MEA). It is also the most renowned platform in Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Dynamics Africa Systems is in a position to ease cloud migration on the most common software platform globally.
On the other hand, ISV handles all the transactions and licensing for Microsoft. It does this on behalf of its African channel partners. This makes it an important digital transformation enabler for hosted Microsoft Dynamics environments. The companies are operational in 15 African countries, offering services to 1,200 customers. It also serves more than 43,000 users across the continent. Zitzke says that the high adoption of Microsoft’s cloud services and the increased adoption of the Microsoft Azure data centre network into SA have improved the cloud migration in Africa. This will rank Africa as the region with the highest rates of adoption globally in the next five years to come. He added that that is the reason why they decided to put much of their investment in 2017 to help make it easy for the delivery of the Microsoft Azure stack.
Dynamics Africa Systems and AccTech are in a position to help in the increase in demand for cloud-based solutions by businesses in Africa. Furthermore, they can assist get a sales channels that will place the business as the largest collateral cloud solution provider (CSP) for Microsoft in the MEA region come 2022.
After the acquisition, AccTech is now in a position to link customer system with other industry 4.0 solutions and services provided. This takes place in the 4Sight Holdings group of companies. Once the customer moves to the cloud the firm can also group other products like integrate business intelligence tools, fully geo-redundant data storage and archiving and backups. This can help increase the efficiency of operations. It can also help attain the increasing regulatory compliance needs of businesses working in the digital era. Dynamic Africa and AccTech are now 4Sight Holdings’ subsidiaries effectively as from today 1st May 2018.
